Staedtler and Faber-Castell's productive pencil rivalry (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Staedtler and Faber-Castell's productive pencil rivalry (2011)

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71 pointsTomte11 comments

Another rivalry in a town close is Adidas and Puma. Founded by two brothers they went two separate ways splitting even the inhabitants of the town:

http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,288...

Side note, faber-castell also produced pocket computer http://imgur.com/a/JUjQh

More traditionally known as the slide rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule

I still have my Faber-Castell slide rule, used it in college.

I just sat down recently and went through my colored pencils collection, which is mighty.

Crayola, Pentech, and Faber-Castell. The Crayola pencils use a hard wood. The Pentech have a soft to the touch feeling. As an artist, each has its uses - think Charcoal versus Pencil - and I was actually quite surprised.

The tactile feeling of the soft wood encourages my intense grip, whereas the hard wood feels like a chore.

I'm incredibly sad that penmanship and manual dexterity are so pushed aside for reasons of "I only type!" or "Those are outdated skills" because of the learning potential that are inherent in the self-discipline of effort.

If you can't write a sentence in cursive, then, by definition, you can't "write" in English. Let that sink in. Sure, you can print, but you can't write. I can write. I can write with a pen, a pencil, or an ink quill. I can also play guitar.

I've learned, probably the hard way, that people tend to make excuses of why they can't do something rather than spend the time to achieve what they can't. Every artist begs for an audience. The problem is when an audience thinks the effort isn't worth appreciating...

There is the artist and there is the artisan or craftsman. It's easy to confuse the two. Hitting a good forehand in tennis takes a lot of practise and skill. Lots of people can do it. There are thousands of skilled tennis players But people will fall over themselves to go watch Federer hit a ball. Because what he does is way beyond just skill. Its art. If you want to call yourself an artist just skill is not enough. When you understand that you automatically produce work that will get appreciation.

About cursive - I tend to believe the things this blog post says: https://morrellshandwriting.co.uk/blog/continuous-cursive-my...

This is also roughly my experience. In my country people are taught continuous cursive in primary school. On average the more intelligent ones stop using it by themselves once they are around 12-14.

Cursive can look beautiful if written by a master, but usually it just looks like a child's handwriting.

Writing cursive would absolutely distract me from thinking, and I'm under the impression that this holds for most people.

The type of cursive taught in American schools is a pretty awful writing system and does require a lot of skill to produce legible script. However, there is another type of cursive that's significantly faster than printing, but it's also very easy to produce legible writing because it's essentially just connected printing. It's cursive Italic.

http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/uploads/post-93151-0...

I think it's more about the fact that today for writing we mostly use pencils and ballpoint pens, and not fountain pens (or feathers) anymore. With fountain pen italic connected cursive is the most natural way to write quickly and cleanly. Writing in block letters with fountain pen is hard, as the tip of the pen goes up or hits the paper on the way down it will leave drops of ink that are very easy to turn into a huge mess. That's why with it you need to be careful and try to write in a continuous movement. With ballpoint pen or ordinary pencil you don't care about the flow of the ink, you can raise and lower the tip anyway you like, hit the paper under any angle, so we all turned into writing the lazy, easier-to-read-afterwords way: using block letters.

> Let that sink in.

This is the sort of rhetorical affectation that will have you ridiculed straight out of any room I'm in. Please discontinue.

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